Renan Devillieres of OSS Ventures explains their highly-successful business model of uniting the disparate cultures of manufacturers and tech companies.
 

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Danny:
- Well hello and welcome to today's IndustrialSage Executive Series interview. I am joined all the way from France. I have the CEO of OSS Ventures, Renan Devillieres. Did I get that right, Renan?
Renan:
- Excellent.
Danny:
- We practiced that many times. Sorry, my French is not that great. Thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series.
Renan:
- Thank you for having me.
Danny:
- I'm super excited about it. Again, I hope I didn't butcher things too badly. But hey, before we get into the episode, I want to know a little bit about OSS Ventures. What do you guys do?
Renan:
- Sure. So we are a venture builder. A venture builder is a special kind of investment fund. Instead of investing funds in companies, start-ups, technological start-ups that already exist, we invest a meaningful amount of money, time, and resources in companies that do not exist yet. We provide the ideas. We provide with the partners, and we create companies out of nothing. And we are specialized in manufacturing.
Danny:
- Interesting. That sounds really interesting, and we're going to get more into that here in a little bit about, specifically, some of the challenges that you're solving and maybe how you're doing this because it sounds very intriguing like a different business model. But before we get into that, I want to learn a little bit about Renan. So tell me. How did you get into the manufacturing space? How did your career start?
Renan:
- At the start of my career—I was a nerd, so I was good at math. I did a school in France where they pay for your studies which is really good but then you have to give back up to two years in public service. I was an economist at the OECD, and I was studying industry at 20-year timeframe, the whole world. After two years doing that I told myself, I cannot go on not dealing with reality anymore because it was all so virtual and so long timeframes. And so I told myself, I like the subject. I like the topic of industry. I'll try to go work in a factory. And so they got a very young guy with a mathematics degree, a theoretical mathematics degree trying to go work in a factory. And I think I sent something like 50 letters, got 50 no's from factories. But I got one yes from the McKinsey & Company consulting arm specializing in factories. They were saying that I was good enough to give some advice to factories. So I did just that, and that is how I started my career in manufacturing. After four or five years working for McKinsey & Company, I went on to lead planning and then quality and then be a site director. And so the eight first years of my career, I was deep down in manufacturing, and I loved it.
Danny:
- That's awesome. That is fantastic. That's pretty cool. That's a great story. Sometimes you hear people that come in; they didn't start from day one. What's kind of interesting, it sounds like you jumped into it, and you found a love for it. I think what's interesting is the–– and I shared that a little bit with you in a different light, that I never thought that we would be working in this space. This was several years ago. Having come into it, it's awesome. It's pretty amazing. But what I think is interesting in your story, you said you sent out, you said 50 letters?
Renan:
- Yeah.
Danny:
- And you got the one response.
Renan:
- Yeah.
Danny:
- And then that opened the door.
Renan: